Nowadays monitoring pharmaceutical residues from surface waters is a widespread analytical task. Most of the studies are conducted from river waters or sewage treatment plants and mainly in Western Europe or North America. Such studies are seldom published from Eastern Europe, especially from stream waters, even though the prescription and consumption patterns of drugs as well as wastewater treatment procedures are very dissimilar. In Hungary the active substance of the most often prescribed drugs are cardiovascular and antiulcer agents. Hence in our study compounds belonging to these two groups were seasonally monitored in two main streams encompassing the Buda side of the Hungarian capital city and flowing into the Danube. To obtain data on the occurrence, fate, and seasonal variation of the compounds, samples were taken from altogether eleven points located near wastewater treatment plants and confluences. The results gave no identifiable pattern in the seasonal variation of concentrations but the contribution of the tributaries and wastewater treatment plants could be followed as expected. From the runoff corrected estuary concentrations the annual contribution of these streams to pharmaceutical pollution of the Danube could be estimated to be in excess of 1？kilogram for atenolol, famotidine, metoprolol, ranitidine, and sotalol. 1. Introduction Pharmaceuticals are emerging contaminants in the environment. After digestion and excretion, due to nonefficient wastewater treatment procedures as well as the improper disposal of expired or nonused drugs they end up in surface waters. Regarding the facts that pharmaceuticals mean a continuous input in the environment and that they are designed to affect the human endocrine systems and additionally to be persistent it is worth to monitor their presence and variation in surface waters. Nowadays more and more surveys are published concerning the determination of pharmaceuticals from surface waters, especially from rivers and of course from sewage treatment plant influent and effluent samples to estimate the removal efficiency during the treatment processes [1–13]. It can be set out that most of these studies have been conducted in Western Europe and in North America but very little is known about the situation in Eastern Europe, even though the environmental concentrations may be very different due to differing patterns of usage, water consumption, and operation conditions of wastewater treatment. As far as we know similar study in Eastern Europe has been conducted only in Romania from Somes River [14–16] and
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